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Bell Canada's Misinformation About Throttling
rsax writes "Bell Canada's chief of regulatory affairs Mirko Bibic has been attempting to justify the throttling of the last-mile connection to independent ISPs. As is typical, Bell Canada is abusing people's confusion between issues around Network Neutrality and the last mile natural monopoly. If people continue to confuse these two related but separate issues, Bell Canada and other incumbent phone and cable companies will win this critical debate."
Actually, that's not even remotely true. Rogers used to throttle BT bandwidth. There were legitimate things that I wanted to do with BT that I couldn't. I am a hobbyist photographer, and I sometimes share stock photos with my buddies. I wish I could've used BT to share those huge RAW files, but I couldn't. I also have to download Linux distros, and WoW updates. Those are legitimate actions that I couldn't engage in because of the throttling. Does engaging in those activities make me a "system abuser"?
As far as I can tell, Rogers doesn't throttle anymore since I've experienced up to 10Mbps for some of my BT transfers, and they've actually offered HIGHER throughput since they stopped throttling (from 8Mbps to 10Mbps). They now put, and enforce, an advertised bandwidth cap on all their plans. My particular plan, the highest available, has 95GB of transfer. They also notify you when you reach 75% of your capacity. If their current practices are any indication, I think that "this neutrality business" is actually a very simple thing to solve. I'm getting exactly what they tell me I'm paying for, a 10Mbps line with a 95GB cap. No draconian laws or heavy oversight. The cure is simple. It's to give your customers what you tell them you will. Instead of advertising "unlimited" or "unmetered" bandwidth, offer different bandwidth caps and different throughput levels at different price ranges.
I have to applaud Rogers for doing this. They've gone about it the right way, and I am now a very, very satisfied customer.
I think the issue lies with the fact that Bell itself is confused. Just remember that upper management doesn't know squat about techie stuff like internets and tubes and stuff. The CEO used to work for CN rail - a company he nearly ran into the ground by causing numerous safety issues, firing inspectors for mentioning things that needed repair. He probably just told the techies to "Make it cheaper for us using any and all means possible. Fuck the customers."
Being a Teksavvy customer, I cannot express how awesome their service is since they use their own bandwidth. Being routed straight through the Toronto Internet Exchange, a mere 6 hops from Google's GTA data centre, is nothing short of exquisite. I simply adore pinging 30ms to eastern seaboard game servers and 10ms to GTA area game servers. Not to mention their incredibly awesome tech support staff who don't even work from flow charts but just know their stuff. (all my calls have ended in under 2 minutes with them fixing the issue or getting back to me the next day with progress)
I was hoping somebody would reply "TEKSAVVY" to the parent and am glad you did. They are easily the best ISP I've used, even if they don't reach the top speeds provided by Bell or Rogers. (no, I do not work for them or have a relative that works for them or anything, I am just a fiercely loyal customer)